Thief/Guide/Combat

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Starting at level 1

A new Thief will start out with three skills already learned: Dodge, Trip, and Bloodletting Stab.

Dodge is automatically used while you fight to avoid incoming damage.

Your rotation at the start will look like so:

• Use Bloodletting Stab at the start of the fight to give the skill's bleed damage the most time to roll
  • Note: While it's possible to use Bloodletting Stab multiple times in a row the bleed does not stack and the enemy will quickly catch onto you and start avoiding your subsequent attempts
• Use Trip for extra damage
  • Note: Trip is incredibly useful while in a group as your teammates will have extra opportunities to hit the target while it's down. However, Trip is less useful when solo as the enemy will generally stand up before you've recovered from the lag the skill applies to you. With that said at this level you don't have many other options.
  • Tip: At low levels thief weapons are generally pointed; these are particularly ineffective against skeleton enemies of which there are many in the lower level areas. Use Trip to deal more consistent damage to these enemies until you can find a blunt weapon

Level 2

New Combat Skill: Dirt Throwing

This skill can temporarily blind your opponent. You should learn this skill now as it is required for one of your key abilities later, but this skill itself has only minor usefulness. Use it if you have nothing else to do in combat.

Level 6

New Combat Skill: Feint

• You can now add Feint into your rotation to deal some extra damage
  • Note: that like Bloodletting Stab the enemy will catch on if you try to use this skill too frequently
  • Tip: A successful Feint lowers the enemy's morale which will provide extremely useful in a few levels when you learn Flourish

Level 9

New Combat Skill: Backstab

At level 9 Thieves learn arguably their most iconic ability: Backstab. To backstab you must use a weapon which can be used as such (See the section on Backstab Weapons in the Equipment Guide for more details). The game will also tell you whether or not your weapon can be used with Backstab by using the check thief command which will say <your weapon> is suitable for backstabbing. or no such message if you cannot. You can't backstab enemies you are already fighting so it can only be used to initiate combat.

From now on you should use Backstab to start a fight whenever possible for several reasons:

• Backstab does an incredible amount of damage
• A successful backstab grants you lots of experience, sometimes more than the fight itself
• You have a chance to execute a "Freak" backstab which does many times more damage that usual, frequently kills the target outright, provides you with a ton of experience (sometimes even enough to gain an entire level at lower levels,) and the entire MUD will be notified of your achievement.

As such your rotation looks something like this:

• Open with Backstab
• Use Bloodletting Stab
• Use Trip for bonus damage, particularly against skeletons and spellcasters
• Sparingly use Feint for more bonus damage

Class Combo: Warrior: For Thieves who have Warrior as their second class: At this point you should also be investing in the Warrior class's skills Thrust and Cry of Victory. Thrust is an incredibly useful filler and should be used instead of Trip and Feint to do bonus damage until more powerful Thief abilities are learned. Cry of Victory should be used after every fight to recover precious health and movement points.

Level 11

New Combat Skill: Flourish

Flourish pairs well with Feint allowing you to do consistent, massive damage during the fight.

Add Flourish into your rotation after Feint. Like most combat abilities using Flourish too often will make enemies more likely to evade it so be careful with spamming it.

Feint and Flourish can both be used with all weapons though they are more effective with one-handed, slicing or stabbing weapons. This means you can start combat with a backstabbing weapon and then swap to a faster weapon for the rest of combat.

Class Combo: Mage: For Thieves who have Mage as their second class: At this point you should learn the Mage spell Burning Hands and use it as often as possible. This will mean needing to keep a hand free so you will be leaving the shield or held item slot empty. However, the power of Burning Hands more than makes up for this. You should cast it before you backstab to make it do even more damage. You should cast it as well during combat as your mana allows for. While it is required that you learn Shower of Sparks to learn Burning Hands I don't recommend using Shower of Sparks in combat. What's more you should be using Mana Shield to reduce incoming damage.

Level 13 & 14

At these levels you learn Cloak of Darkness, Poison Handling, and Brew Poison

While useful at later levels you will likely not have the Infravision required to make use of Cloak of Darkness. However, Cloak of Darkness is required to later learn the incredibly powerful Shadow Blades skill so you should either learn this skill now or be sure to save the practices you'll need to learn the tree later.

The Brew Poison and Poison Handling skills make it possible to... well brew poisons and apply it to your weapons. This is only marginally useful at low levels as it takes significant time to gather appropriate ingredients to successfully brew a poison and even once you do poison only lasts a few rounds in combat. Learn this now only if you want to delve into the world of ingredient gathering and tinkering with brewing. These skills can arguably be put off until a much higher level.

Level 16

New Combat Skills

Knife Throwing

Shadow Bind

Knife Throwing is your bread and butter damage ability for the foreseeable future though you'll have to wait until next level to truly leverage its power. Learn it now, wait until level 17 to use it. More detail on its usage will be in the following section.

Shadow Bind is useful to prevent mobs from fleeing as well as making the enemy less able to dodge. You should learn this skill to continue down the Shadow tree.

Level 17

New Combat Skill: Shadow Blades

At this point you have a choice between two playstyles: the knife thrower, or the duelist.

• The duelist playstyle will keep using Feint and Flourish, trading some raw output with more defense (ability to wear a shield) and flexibility (your damage is based off your weapon which swap at will.)
• The knife thrower playstyle will forgot nearly all of their active abilities to instead chuck a whole lot of Shadow Blades at their enemies. This is extremely powerful against non-ethereal enemies. The downside is that against small, difficult-to-hit enemies or enemies immune to normal damage will pose extreme challenges requiring you to fall back to a standard playstyle

If you go down the Duelist playstyle you may still want to pick up this skill even if you don't use it as it is a requirement for Shadow Decoy later. Your rotation remains as-is.

If you go down the Knife Thrower playstyle, before combat you should use shadow blades to conjure at least 4 shadow blades to use for knife throwing, preferably 8 if your dexterity allows you to hold that many items. While using Knife Throwing some of the blades will fall to the ground which you can freely pick up during combat; I suggest setting up an alias to quickly pick up the dropped blades. Some of the blades, however, if they hit the target will be stuck in their inventory until they're killed, this is why it's important to conjure a couple sets so you don't have to reconjure during combat.

Your rotation will now be:

• Open up with backstab if you can take the hits after the initial lag
• Optionally use Bloodletting Stab at the start of combat
• Spam knife throwing with your shadow blades

Most targets at this level will be dead within 3 or 4 uses of Knife Throwing. Some may even die faster if you skip the initial backstab and bloodletting stab and instead just throw another blade.

Class Combo: Cleric: The hammers spawned by Spirit Hammer have a dieroll based off your Strength. If you have a sufficiently high strength they may be more powerful to throw than the shadow blades. The more useful function of Spirit Hammer if you know it, however, is that you can customize the damage type which allows you to throw magic or elemental hammers at ethereal enemies which your shadow blades would otherwise not be able to damage.

Level 20

New Combat Skill: Crippling Strike

Crippling Strike hits extremely hard as it ignores an enemy's armor. It's like a mid-combat backstab. The downside is that it is has lots of lag after use just like backstab.

If you are following the Duelist playstyle you will simply add Crippling Strike into your rotation after Flourish. Feint resets the cooldown of both Flourish and Crippling Strike so your rotation will look like this:

1. Open with Backstab
2. Bloodletting Stab
3. Flourish
4. Crippling Strike
5. Feint
   • Make sure the feint is successful, subsequent Flourish or Crippling Strike are nearly guaranteed to miss if you don't reset their cooldowns with a successful feint
6. Repeat from 3 until the mob is dead, occasionally refreshing Bloodletting stab

By this point in the game it's extremely important that you are using correct damage types against enemies. Piercing weapons are useless against skeletons, blunt weapons are useless against blobs, etc. Always consider a mob before attacking to see which elements and damage types are most effective.